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Randy Pitchford explains how a childhood of making video games germinated the idea of Gearbox’s big franchise, Borderlands.
Pitchford retold this story in the recent documentary 24 ‘Til Launch: The Making of Borderlands 4. You can hear him tell his story here, but we’ll summarize the story below.
Growing Up With PC Games
Pitchford described growing up with adventure games and text-based adventure games on PC. He didn’t name any titles here, but he talked about his fascination with them in detail.
I was doing text-based adventures, which are turn-based if you think about it? Where you type something in, and if the parser understands what you typed, you’ll get a response. And you can try to explore a world, or solve puzzles or whatever the adventure puts you on.
And that leads to role-playing games where you have stats and there’s monsters and you want to get loot and get stronger. And the kinds of rewards, the gratification and stimulation that I got from playing games that back in the early days was a long-term thing.
Pitchford Didn’t Love Arcade Games?
Pitchford then compared this to his experience playing arcade games, which he didn’t love as much as those PC turn-based games.
Yeah, I played the arcade games. I played Space Invaders and Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and all that. And I’d, borrow cash from my parents’ wallets to go change it in for quarters at the pizza shop down the street so that I can play the arcade games that they had there.
For some reason, in that period, I almost had a lower respect for that fast limbic reward system. I almost had a – I don’t want to say disrespect, but I didn’t have the same love for those moment-to-moment action games that I did for those big immersive long-term growth and reward and exploration games.
We can understand Pitchford’s point. Of course, some gamers have their preference, not just with individual titles, but genres or even platforms.
But this is where Pitchford changes his mind about these action games, when he goes back to game on the PC.
Borderlands’ Secret ‘Ah-ha!’ Moment
And then Apogee and ID Software released Wolfenstein 3D and the combination of seeing the world from the first person perspective and having it be fast.
…And then with the gameplay that was on top of it where, oh my God, they’re trying to kill me. And I got to dodge this incoming stuff and at the same time, their health goes down and it knocks them down, while they’re trying to make my health go down and knock me down.
And this target game that we’re playing back and forth. It’s extremely high energy, gnarly hits of dopamine and adrenaline instantaneously. It renewed my love and respect for what an action game could be and what that game was specifically.
It certainly isn’t obvious at first glance, but Pitchford name dropped Wolfenstein 3D as the one that changed his perspective.
We think this will shock a lot of gamers too, since Wolfenstein 3D feels nothing like Borderlands if you play it today. But Pitchford was in that generation when Pac-Man and Akalabeth were new. So his insight was generational.
Lastly, we’ll let Pitchford describe the ‘ah-ha!’ moment in his head.
It changed my worldview and it was not long after that while I was playing Wolfenstein where the world parsed these as two different universes. There’s the role-playing game over here and that’s one whole thing, and in a million miles away there’s Wolfenstein 3D over here and that’s a totally different thing.
… And if you can put the moment-to-moment feelings in the same space as this long range engagement that I get out of role-playing that, then I’ll have everything. That’s the thing I want. So that’s when the idea started.
That the moment-to-moment fun of first person action is not mutually exclusive to the long-term sense of accomplishment and rewards that comes with growth and leveling up and all that that you put in a role playing game.
